With the world of tech expanding so rapidly over the last few years, it is easy for companies to spend vast amounts of time on all things digital, without every giving thought to why they are doing the things they are doing - or measuring whether they are worth it. Many businesses will have a marketing strategy and commercial objectives in place, but it is important that you consider a specific digital strategy to support your business and help you to achieve your goals.

Strategy is everything. Without clear thought processes, reasons for behaviour and ways to measure your effectiveness, how can you possibly know whether what you’re doing is right?

If you’re about to draft your first digital strategy and are looking for some ideas to focus your thoughts, here’s our top tips for what you need to include.

What are your goals and objectives?

What are you trying to achieve? Is your digital strategy setting out ways for you to increase sales or bookings? Or is it giving you a way to communicate your brand values and help customers get to know your company and engage with it?

Different channels will engage with people in different ways, so you have to have a clear idea of what you’d like your outcomes to be before you start.

Look at your existing channels and work out what KPIs you want to measure your success against

Take a look at all of the digital activity you’re already undertaking. Get an idea of what is performing well, what needs some effort and where your effort is being expended. You should be looking at the following areas.

Your website traffic - users and sessions

Bounce rates
Pages per visit and time on site
Site conversions - are people filling out forms on your website? Are you able to track your sales or bookings?
Search engine performance - what are the keywords people are using to find you?
What does your audience demographic look like and does it measure up to what you thought of your audience?

This should be something you refer to regularly and check every few weeks.

Audit your website performance

There are lots of tools out there which can help you with looking at your website performance. My colleague Alistair Banks at Optix Solutions wrote a post about this some time ago and his top recommendations included the following:

Search Metrics – gives a glimpse of your overall search engine visibility. You can also map yourself against competitors and see which key phrases you are performing well for.
Moz – site audits, keyword research, back link audits, and more.
SEM Rush – all-round tool for everything from auditing to ongoing monitoring across paid, social and search.
PageSpeed – how quick your website loads is a ranking factor, so should be taken seriously. Google’s tool will measure speed and point out ways of improving it.
Mobile-Friendly test – we are moving quickly towards a mobile dominated world, so it’s important to know how your website performs.
Mobile-First Indexing – Check out our video on mobile-first indexing, which came into effect in July 2018
Screaming Frog – for those who want a deeper understanding of the technical elements, this program crawls your website to take a fine-toothed comb to your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Majestic SEO – the world’s largest link index database, and therefore the ultimate backlink audit tool.
Authority Labs – an easy way to track your keywords and their rankings.

What do you know about your audience?

Your digital strategy needs to include clear information about your typical customer. Who are you targeting? Who engages with you at the moment? What do you know about them? Create your buyer persona and keep thinking at every stage of your planning - how do I communicate with this person?

Draft a plan for the next 12 months

Once you have all of this information at your fingertips. you’ll have a really good idea of what you’re doing and why you are doing it. How do you want to be spending time on digital channels and how are you going to measure the effectiveness of what you do?

Come up with a calendar of activity. What are you going to do each month? What tactics and channels are you going to use? What are the measurements of success?

You should be considering all of the following options in your digital strategy.

Website - the biggest window to your business and the most valuable digital tool you own. What is your user experience? What is your back end system? Does your navigation work? How does the site perform?

Search - are you investing in search engine optimisation? Are you working with partners to ensure your site is performing? What content are you creating to make sure you perform well in search?
Paid for advertising - social media advertising, pay per click, remarketing, display network and advertising with valuable partners or referrers are some of the many ways you can invest in online advertising. Test out your different kinds of ads and see what works best for you.
Email – using software like Mailchimp or Flodesk to get the most out of your audience communications. You will have email subscription lists of people - all GDPR compliant! - who want to engage with your company. What content do you want to send them that builds your relationship? And how do you build your list if you don’t have one you can be proud of?
Social media - which platforms are right for you and what audiences are you communicating with on each? People use them in different ways. This is a very organic way of building engagement with your audiences. Create relationships with your customers.
Digital outreach – how are you going to reach people who are outside of your existing network of contacts? How will they find out about you? What content will you create that reaches them and speaks to their needs?
Immersive,or virtual experiences - how can you show, and not just tell, your audience about what they’ll get from your business? What investment in video/film collateral are you making? What online tours can you offer? What have you produced that allows people to visually engage with your product or service in a tangible way?
Bloggers and social media influencers – looking at realistic propositions for collaborations and thinking about meaningful ways to build a relationship. Always ensure that your prospective collaborators share your brand values and seem like a natural alignment.
And back to those goals - what are you asking people to do to convert? Are you measuring sales/enquiries/bookings? What are the conversion goals you have for your digital channels.

Digital is a vast area, and there’s so many things that can be focused on. This article gives you a taster of the information you need to be pulling together to have a clear digital strategy for your organisation.

If you would like more support in creating a strategy and campaign plan for your business, please do get in touch with us to continue this conversation. We can offer tailored advice and guidance, fully audit your digital performance and create strategic recommendations and digital plans for you moving forward.

Picture credit: Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

How to write a digital strategy